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Take Control of Your Drums with MDrumEnhancer

September 25, 2018

Mixing Drums

Today, there are many audio processing tools you can use to mix drum sounds. Various equalizers and compressors are vital, but some tools are making a big change when it comes to dealing with drum sounds. As a result, they save us a lot of time and energy. One of them is MDrumEnhancer by Melda Productions.

MDrumEnhancer

MDrumEnhancer is a unique and powerful processor that can enhance or completely transform your audio material. By using the information extracted from high-quality samples it creates a process and resynthesizes the signal. Then, it blends that with your original signal, allowing you to change the characteristics of your drum hits. For example, you can add a snap to a kick, noise or body to a snare or drastically change the original sound for creative use. Therefore, it provides an incredible amount of control at the plugins advanced feature set. Furthermore, it’s easy to use and gives excellent sounding results in just a few clicks.

In this tutorial, we will take a look at how to use the MDrumEnhancer and ways it can outperform traditional processors such as drum replacers and equalizers.

Firstly, I have made a new pattern in SoundBridge which contains drums, bass and a melodic sequence.

Let`s place an instance of MDrumEnhancer on the “808 Clap” channel. But first, let us hear how this drum sound sounds unprocessed.

Here we can see a very straight-forward interface. I will go thru the main parameters that I frequently use, but there is so much more “underneath the hood.” Consequently, feel free to dive in deeper.

Let’s start

The first thing to do will be to chose the sample which will be used to resynthesize the original sound, and we can find that section on the bottom left. A Very useful parameter is “ PITCH “ which you can use to tune the final sound according to the root note of the track itself. In the section above we see quite a few parameters which are:

Gate

Controls the minimum input level. It allows you to deal with low-level leakage from other drums.

Compression

Controls the level adjustment on the enhancement signal, which suggests a type of compression, hence the control name.

Delay

Lets you delay the enhancement signal to the input (positive values) or delay the input to the enhancement signal (negative values), which then looks ahead of time in a way and reports the delay as latency so that the host can compensate and keep the timing correct.

Sustain

Controls how slowly the enhancement signal fades away. Use low values to make the output follow the original signal tightly. With high values, you can simulate the “big” sound and even a short reverb.

Character

Controls the enhancement signal type. Different values sound different, so it is advised to set this by trial and error or leave it as default. The basic idea is that the processor enhances the original input, but also creates an entirely new enhancement signal, and the character controls the ratio between them.

Here is how the “ 808 Clap “ sounds after being processed with MDrumEnhancer.

~808 Clap – MDrumEnhancerAs you can hear, it dramatically changes character, warmness, space and many other things. Additionally, let’s process the “Tom“ and the “Live Clap“ sounds with MDrumEnhancer. Here is how they sound without and with the plugin.